Enclosure
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
-- 17th century protest against English enclosure |
All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.
2. The rich man in the castle, the poor man at the gate,
God made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate.
|
Rousseau
The first man who, having enclosed a
piece of ground, bethought himself
of saying, “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe
him, was the real founder of civil society.
From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and
misfortunes, might not anyone have
saved mankind by pulling up the
stakes, filling in the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “BEWARE OF
LISTENING TO THIS IMPOSTOR; YOU ARE UNDONE IF YOU ONCE FORGET THAT THE
FRUITS OF THE EARTH BELONG TO US ALL, AND THE EARTH ITSELF TO NOBODY.”
a synopsis of Robert V. Andelson and James M. Dawsey: From
Wasteland to Promised land:
Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World
Because George asserted, "We
must make land common property," he is sometimes erroneously regarded
as an advocate of land nationalization. But, as we have seen, he was
nothing of the sort. The expropriation of land makes it practically
impossible to fairly compensate people for the improvements to land,
which are their legitimate property. George's system renders to the
community what is due to the community, without doing any violence to
the wealth that has been fairly earned by productive workers.
Common property in land is sometimes discredited by equation
with what Garrett Hardin calls "The Tragedy of the Commons." Referring
to the common lands that were a major English institution until the
mid-nineteenth century, Hardin describes the tendency of individuals,
each rationally pursuing self-interest, to overgraze, denude, and use
the commons as a cesspool. That which belongs to everybody in this
sense is, indeed, in danger of being valued and maintained by nobody.
The enclosure movement ultimately brought an end to this
ecologically destructive process, but not without literally pushing
people off the land, exacting a baneful price in human misery that
might well be termed "The Tragedy of the Enclosures." George hit upon a
way of securing the benefits of both commons and enclosures, while at
the same time avoiding their evils. Land value taxation rectifies
distribution so that all receive wealth in proportion to their
contribution to its production. This liberates the economic system from
exploiters who contribute little or nothing. Apportioning the wealth
pie fairly increases the incentive to increase the size of the pie. The
market becomes in practice what capitalist theory alleges it to be -- a
profoundly cooperative process of voluntary exchange of goods and
services. Paradoxical though it may seem, the only way the individual
may be assured what properly belongs to him or her is for society to
take what properly belongs to it: The ideal of Jeffersonian
individualism requires for its actualization the socialization of rent.
Just as Marxists err in insisting that everything be socialized,
extreme capitalists err in insisting that everything (even public parks
and forests!) be privatized. The middle way is to recognize society's
claim to what nature and society create -- the value of land and its
rent -- so that working people, including entrepreneurs, may claim
their full share of what they create. In this balanced approach can be
found the authentic verities respectively inherent in socialism and
individualism. Read the whole synopsis
Henry George: The Condition
of Labor — An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII in response to Rerum
Novarum (1891)
Your use, in so many passages of your Encyclical, of the inclusive term “property” or “private” property,
of which in morals nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your
meaning, if we take isolated sentences, in many places ambiguous. But
reading it as a whole, there can be no doubt of your intention that private
property in land shall be understood when you speak merely of private
property. With this interpretation, I find that the reasons you urge
for private property in land are eight. Let us consider them in order
of presentation. You urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is rightful property.
(RN, paragraph 5) ...
2. That private property in land proceeds from man’s gift of reason.
(RN, paragraphs 6-7.) ...
3. That private property in land deprives no one of the use of land.
(RN, paragraph 8.) ...
4. That Industry expended on land gives ownership in the land itself.
(RN, paragraphs 9-10.) ...
5. That private property in land has the support of the common opinion
of mankind, and has conduced to peace and tranquillity, and that it is
sanctioned by Divine Law. (RN, paragraph 11.) ...
6. That fathers should provide for their children and that private property
in land is necessary to enable them to do so. (RN, paragraphs 14-17.)
...
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates industry, increases
wealth, and attaches men to the soil and to their country. (RN, paragraph
51.) ...
8. That the right to possess private property in land is from nature,
not from man; that the state has no right to abolish it, and that to
take the value of landownership in taxation would be unjust and cruel
to the private owner. (RN, paragraph 51.) ...
5. That private property in land has the support of the common
opinion of mankind, and has conduced to peace and tranquillity, and
that it is
sanctioned by Divine Law. (11.)
Even were it true that the common opinion of mankind has sanctioned
private property in land, this would no more prove its justice than the
once universal practice of the known world would have proved the justice
of slavery.
But it is not true. Examination will show that wherever we can trace
them the first perceptions of mankind have always recognized the equality
of right to land, and that when individual possession became necessary
to secure the right of ownership in things produced by labor some method
of securing equality, sufficient in the existing state of social development,
was adopted. Thus, among some peoples, land used for cultivation was
periodically divided, land used for pasturage and wood being held in
common. Among others, every family was permitted to hold what land it
needed for a dwelling and for cultivation, but the moment that such use
and cultivation stopped any one else could step in and take it on like
tenure. Of the same nature were the land laws of the Mosaic code. The
land, first fairly divided among the people, was made inalienable by
the provision of the jubilee, under which, if sold, it reverted every
fiftieth year to the children of its original possessors.
Private property in land as we know it, the attaching to land of the
same right of ownership that justly attaches to the products of labor,
has never grown up anywhere save by usurpation or force. Like slavery,
it is the result of war. It comes to us of the modern world from your
ancestors, the Romans, whose civilization it corrupted and whose empire
it destroyed.
It made with the freer spirit of the northern peoples the combination
of the feudal system, in which, though subordination was substituted
for equality, there was still a rough recognition of the principle of
common rights in land. A fief was a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed
some obligation. The sovereign, the representative of the whole people,
was the only owner of land. Of him, immediately or mediately, held tenants,
whose possession involved duties or payments, which, though rudely and
imperfectly, embodied the idea that we would carry out in the single
tax, of taking land values for public uses. The crown lands maintained
the sovereign and the civil list; the church lands defrayed the cost
of public worship and instruction, of the relief of the sick, the destitute
and the wayworn; while the military tenures provided for public defense
and bore the costs of war. A fourth and very large portion of the land
remained in common, the people of the neighborhood being free to pasture
it, cut wood on it, or put it to other common uses.
In this partial yet substantial recognition of common rights to land
is to be found the reason why, in a time when the industrial arts were
rude, wars frequent, and the great discoveries and inventions of our
time unthought of, the condition of the laborer was devoid of that grinding
poverty which despite our marvelous advances now exists. Speaking of
England, the highest authority on such subjects, the late Professor Therold
Rogers, declares that in the thirteenth century there was no class so
poor, so helpless, so pressed and degraded as are millions of Englishmen
in our boasted nineteenth century; and that, save in times of actual
famine, there was no laborer so poor as to fear that his wife and children
might come to want even were he taken from them. Dark and rude in many
respects as they were, these were the times when the cathedrals and churches
and religious houses whose ruins yet excite our admiration were built;
the times when England had no national debt, no poor law, no standing
army, no hereditary paupers, no thousands and thousands of human beings
rising in the morning without knowing where they might lay their heads
at night.
With the decay of the feudal system, the system of private property
in land that had destroyed Rome was extended. As to England, it may briefly
be said that the crown lands were for the most part given away to favorites;
that the church lands were parceled among his courtiers by Henry VIII.,
and in Scotland grasped by the nobles; that the military dues were finally
remitted in the seventeenth century, and taxation on consumption substituted;
and that by a process beginning with the Tudors and extending to our
own time all but a mere fraction of the commons were inclosed by the
greater landowners; while the same private ownership of land was extended
over Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, partly by the sword and partly
by bribery of the chiefs. Even the military dues, had they been commuted,
not remitted, would today have more than sufficed to pay all public expenses
without one penny of other taxation.
Of the New World, whose institutions but continue those of Europe, it
is only necessary to say that to the parceling out of land in great tracts
is due the backwardness and turbulence of Spanish America; that to the
large plantations of the Southern States of the Union was due the persistence
of slavery there, and that the more northern settlements showed the earlier
English feeling, land being fairly well divided and the attempts to establish
manorial estates coming to little or nothing. In this lies the secret
of the more vigorous growth of the Northern States. But the idea
that land was to be treated as private property had been thoroughly established
in English thought before the colonial period ended, and it has been
so treated by the United States and by the several States. And though
land was at first sold cheaply, and then given to actual settlers, it
was also sold in large quantities to speculators, given away in great
tracts for railroads and other purposes, until now the public domain
of the United States, which a generation ago seemed illimitable, has
practically gone. And this, as the experience of other countries shows,
is the natural result in a growing community of making land private property.
When the possession of land means the gain of unearned wealth, the strong
and unscrupulous will secure it. But when, as we propose, economic rent,
the “unearned increment of wealth,” is taken by the state
for the use of the community, then land will pass into the hands of users
and remain there, since no matter how great its value, its possession
will be profitable only to users.
As to private property in land having conduced to the peace and tranquillity
of human life, it is not necessary more than to allude to the notorious
fact that the struggle for land has been the prolific source of wars
and of lawsuits, while it is the poverty engendered by private property
in land that makes the prison and the workhouse the unfailing attributes
of what we call Christian civilization.
Your Holiness intimates that the Divine Law gives its sanction to the
private ownership of land, quoting from Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his house, nor his field, nor
his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything
which is his.”
If, as your Holiness conveys, this inclusion of the words, “nor
his field,” is to be taken as sanctioning private property in land
as it exists today, then, but with far greater force, must the words, “his
man-servant, nor his maid-servant,” be taken to sanction chattel
slavery; for it is evident from other provisions of the same code that
these terms referred both to bondsmen for a term of years and to perpetual
slaves. But the word “field” involves the idea of use and
improvement, to which the right of possession and ownership does attach
without recognition of property in the land itself. And that this reference
to the “field” is not a sanction of private property in land
as it exists today is proved by the fact that the Mosaic code expressly
denied such unqualified ownership in land, and with the declaration, “the
land also shall not be sold forever, because it is mine, and you are
strangers and sojourners with me,” provided for its reversion every
fiftieth year; thus, in a way adapted to the primitive industrial conditions
of the time, securing to all of the chosen people a foothold in the soil.
Nowhere in fact throughout the Scriptures can the slightest justification
be found for the attaching to land of the same right of property that
justly attaches to the things produced by labor. Everywhere is it treated
as the free bounty of God, “the land which the Lord thy God giveth
thee.” ... read the whole letter
Rev. A. C. Auchmuty: Gems from George,
a themed collection of
excerpts from the writings of Henry George (with links to sources)
THE tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only
upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon
them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community,
for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community.
It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent
is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality
ordained by nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any
other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and
each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor
get its full reward, and capital its natural return. — Progress & Poverty — Book
VIII, Chapter 3, Application of the Remedy: The Proposition Tried by the Canons
of Taxation
HERE is a provision made by natural law for the increasing needs of social growth;
here is an adaptation of nature by virtue of which the natural progress of society
is a progress toward equality not toward inequality; a centripetal force tending
to unity growing out of and ever balancing a centrifugal force tending to diversity.
Here is a fund belonging to society as a whole, from which without the degradation
of alms, private or public, provision can be made for the weak, the helpless,
the aged; from which provision can be made for the common wants of all as a matter
of common right to each. — Social
Problems — Chapter
19, The First Great Reform
NOT only do all economic considerations point to a tax on land values
as the proper source of public revenues; but so do all British traditions.
A land tax of four shillings in the pound of rental value is still nominally
enforced in England, but being levied on a valuation made in the reign
of William III, it amounts in reality to not much over a penny in the
pound. With the abolition of indirect taxation this is the tax to which
men would naturally turn. The resistance of landholders would bring up
the question of title, and thus any movement which went so far as to
propose the substitution of direct for indirect taxation must inevitably
end in a demand for the restoration to the British people of their birthright. — Protection
or Free Trade— Chapter 27: The Lion in the Way - econlib
THE feudal system, which is not peculiar to Europe but seems to be the natural
result of the conquest of a settled country by a race among whom equality and
individuality are yet strong, clearly recognized, in theory at least, that
the land belongs to society at large, not to the individual. Rude outcome of
an age in which might stood for right as nearly as it ever can (for the idea
of right is ineradicable from the human mind, and must in some shape show itself
even in the association of pirates and robbers), the feudal system yet admitted
in no one the uncontrolled and exclusive right to land. A fief was essentially
a a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed obligation. The sovereign, theoretically
the representative of the collective power and rights of the whole people,
was in feudal view the only absolute owner of land. And though land was granted
to individual possession, yet in its possession were involved duties, by which
the enjoyer of its revenues was supposed to render back to the commonwealth
an equivalent for the benefits which from the delegation of the common right
he received. — Progress &Poverty — Book
VII, Chapter 4, Justice of the Remedy: Private Property in Land Historically
Considered
THE abolition of the military tenures in England by the Long Parliament,
ratified after the accession of Charles II, though simply an appropriation
of public revenues by the feudal landowners, who thus got rid of the
consideration on which they held the common property of the nation, and
saddled it on the people at large in the taxation of all consumers, has
been long characterized, and is still held up in the law books, as a
triumph of the spirit of freedom. Yet here is the source of the immense
debt and heavy taxation of England. Had the form of these feudal dues
been simply changed into one better adapted to the changed times, English
wars need never have occasioned the incurring of debt to the amount of
a single pound, and the labor and capital of England need not have been
taxed a single farthing for the maintenance of a military establishment.
All this would have come from rent, which the landholders since that
time have appropriated to themselves — from the tax which land
ownership levies on the earnings of labor and capital. The landholders
of England got their land on terms which required them even in the sparse
population of Norman days to put in the field, upon call, sixty thousand
perfectly equipped horsemen, and on the further condition of various
fines and incidents which amounted to a considerable part of the rent.
It would probably be a low estimate to put the pecuniary value of these
various services and dues at one-half the rental value of the land. Had
the landholders been kept to this contract and no land been permitted
to be inclosed except upon similar terms, the income accruing to the
nation from English land would today be greater by many millions than
the entire public revenues of the United Kingdom. England today might
have enjoyed absolute free trade. There need not have been a customs
duty, an excise, license or income tax, yet all the present expenditures
could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted to any purpose
which would conduce to the comfort or well-being of the whole people. — Progress &Poverty — Book
VII, Chapter 4, Justice of the Remedy: Private Property in Land Historically
Considered
... go to "Gems from George"
Dan Sullivan: Are you a Real
Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?
John Locke is often misrepresented
by royal libertarians, who
quote him very selectively. For example, Locke did say that:
Whatsoever then he
removes out of the state that nature
hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and
joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his
property.
But Locke condemned anyone who
took more than he needed as a
"spoiler of the commons":
...if the fruits rotted, or
the venison putrified,
before he could spend it, he offended against the common law of nature,
and was liable to be punished; he invaded his neighbour's share, for he
had no right, farther than his use called for any of them, and they
might serve to afford him conveniences of life.
The same measures governed
the possession of land too:
whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it
spoiled, that was his peculiar right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could
feed, and make use of, the cattle and product was also his. But if
either the grass of his enclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of
his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of
the earth, notwithstanding his enclosure, was still to be looked on as
waste, and might be the possession of any other.
Locke also restricted
appropriation of land by the proviso,
ignored by royal libertarians, that there must be still enough, and
as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in
effect, there was never the less left for others because of his
enclosure for himself: for he that leaves as much as another can make
use of, does as good as take nothing at all.
Now if the situation is that there
is enough free land, and as
good, left after you take and cultivate your land, than your land has
no market value, for who would pay you for land that is not better
than land that can be had for free? So, besides the fact that Locke's
justification of privatizing land is far more limited than royal
libertarians portray it to be, it is irrelevant to the question of
land value tax, as it applies only to land that has no value.
Furthermore, Locke based his
scenario on pre-monetary societies,
where a landholder would find that "it was useless, as well as
dishonest, to carve himself too much, or take more than he needed."
With the introduction of money, Locke noted, all land quickly became
appropriated. Why? Because with money, those who can take more land
than they have personal use for suddenly have reason to do so, as
between them they will have taken all the land, and others will
have to pay rent to them. So, with the introduction of money, the
Lockean rationale for landed property falls apart, even according to
Locke.
And while Locke did not propose a
remedy specifically for to this
problem, he repeatedly stated that all taxes should be on real
estate. ... Read the whole piece
Bill Batt: How Our Towns Got That
Way (1996 speech)
One must start by looking at how
the meaning of the word property
has changed over the course of centuries. In most societies of the
world, as was true in classic western thought, property typically
meant personal property - clothing, household goods, bodily
adornments and armor, and similar such items. Land was typically
owned by society in common, or perhaps belonged to God or nature.
Roman law made some effort to allot land titles to private
individuals and families, but it was honored more in theory than in
fact. Indeed, it was not until the now well-documented "enclosure
movement" in early Tudor England that land titles began their
long transformation from what has been termed "leasehold" to "freehold." Against
the will of the King and his Council, noblemen seized the land for themselves,
marking it into defined
units, fenced off in their names only, even when they had no use for
it. Karl Polanyi noted that: Enclosures have
appropriately been called a revolution of the rich
against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social
order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of
violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally
robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the
houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor
had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society
was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human
dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution
raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns,
decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust,
harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a
mob of beggars and thieves. ... read the whole article
Bill Batt: The
Compatibility of Georgist Economics and Ecological Economics
Lastly, one must appreciate that
the market value of “land” of every
sort is entirely rent, as there is no human factor of labor that
accounts for its origination. Services of nature have no prior cost to
bring them into production existence — the electromagnetic spectrum,
for example, exists regardless of human presence on earth and so
presumably does time. Ocean fish, fossil fuels, and heavy metals are
all found in nature, not the result of human creation. They are, in
19th century classical economics, the fruits not of man’s labor but of
God’s. And it is to God, or at least to God’s representative on earth —
the lords and kings — that rent was owed, just as much as it was their
role to provide reciprocal services to the tenants of the land. That
bargain, so well refined in feudal economic arrangements, was an
equilibrium balance, disrupted, one might say, by the annulment of rent
collection and the exploitation of land without
recognition of its price. The
practice effectively ended with what in
Britain is known as the “enclosure movement” of the early Tudor reign,
driving the peasants off the land into cities to provide cheap labor
for the early English industrialists.28 But
the theory continued long afterwards. Georgists today argue that land
rent should be collected from titleholders so that it is not left to
render economic distortions. This in turn affects the price of labor
and the price of money. Government’s role, whatever else it does, is at
the very least responsible for defending the commons, to ascertain
titles and to collect rent. Although there are many differences about
the proper role, scope and domain of government among Georgist
adherents, the collection of rent and the supervision of open markets
is central to its tenets. ... read the whole article
Peter Barnes: Capitalism
3.0 — Chapter 1: Time to Upgrade (pages 3-14)
If you heard about the commons before you picked up this book, your
impressions were probably shaped by a 1968 article called “The
Tragedy of the Commons.” In that article, biologist Garrett Hardin
used the metaphor of an unmanaged pasture to suggest a root cause of
many planetary problems.
The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him
to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another. . . . But
this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing
a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that
compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that
is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing
his own best interest. . . . Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Hardin’s notion of tragedy was taken from philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead, who in turn drew upon Aristotle. According to Whitehead, the
essence of tragedy is “the remorseless working of things.” In
Hardin’s view, commons are fated to self-destruct. There’s
nothing humans can do in the context of the commons to halt this inexorable
outcome.
Hardin was right about humanity’s unrelenting destruction of nature,
but wrong about its cause and inexorability. He blamed the commons itself,
when the true destroyer was, and remains, forces outside the commons.
In Hardin’s hypothetical, the commons does nothing to protect itself
against those forces. It’s completely unmanaged. But there’s
no inherent reason why commons can’t be managed as commons.
Contrary to the picture painted by Hardin, medieval European commons
(which included not only pastures but forests and streams) were far from
unmanaged. They had rules barring access to outsiders and limiting use
by villagers. For example, a rule that persists today in many Swiss villages
is that villagers can’t graze in common pasture more animals than
they can feed over winter on their own land. A managed commons, in other
words, isn’t inherently self-destructive. The real danger
to the commons is enclosure and trespass by outsiders. ... read
the whole chapter
Peter Barnes: Capitalism
3.0 — Chapter 2: A Short History of Capitalism (pages 15-32)
Enclosure, in which property rights are literally taken or given away,
is half the reason for the commons’ decline; the other half is
a form of trespass called externalizing — that is, shifting costs
to the commons. Externalizing is as relentless as enclosure, yet much
less noticed, since it requires no active aid from politicians. It
occurs quietly and continuously as corporations add illth to the commons
without permission or payment.
The one-two punch of enclosure and externalizing is especially potent.
With one hand, corporations take valuable stuff from the commons and
privatize it. With the other hand, they dump bad stuff into the commons
and pay nothing. The result is profits for corporations but a steady
loss of value for the commons. ... read
the whole chapter
Peter Barnes: Capitalism
3.0 — Chapter 8: Sharing Culture (pages 117-134)
So far I’ve focused on the commons of nature and community. In
this chapter I explore the third fork of the commons river, culture.
By this I mean the gifts of language, art, and science we inherit, plus
the contributions we make as we live.
Culture is a joint undertaking — a co-production — of individuals
and society. The symphonies of Mozart, like the songs of Lennon and McCartney,
are works of genius. But they also arise from the culture in which that
genius lives. The instrumentation, the notation system, and the prevalent
musical forms are the dough from which composers bake their cakes. So
too with ideas. All thinkers and writers draw on stories and discoveries
that have been developed by countless men and women before them. To paraphrase
Isaac Newton, each generation sees a little farther because it stands
on the shoulders of its predecessors. In this way, all new work draws
from the commons and then enriches it. To keep art and science flourishing,
we have to make sure the cultural commons is cared for.
In addition, unlike most natural commons, the cultural commons is inexhaustible.
Shakespeare’s plays can be “used” again and again without
diminishing them. The same is true of Newton’s theories, Beethoven’s
string quartets, and the information on the World Wide Web. Indeed, the
more we use these assets, the more value they bestow. And thanks to technology — from
Gutenberg’s press to Marconi’s radio to the globe-spanning
Internet — sharing this wealth has become increasingly easy.
Today, unfortunately, this cultural commons, like the commons of nature
and community, is being enclosed by private corporations. The danger
is that corporations will deplete the soil in which culture grows. The
remedy is to reinvigorate the cultural commons. ... read
the whole chapter
see also: http://www.poclad.org/articles/zepernick02.html
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